Overstaying
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- €8.49
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- €8.49
Publisher Description
<p>An isolated woman clashes with an enigmatic visitor in this funny, jagged parable about integration, difference and hospitality
An isolated young woman living in a small Swiss town decides to take in a mysterious stranger, known only as 'the visitor'. His arrival introduces disturbance into her carefully sealed life, and the longer he stays, the more confounding he becomes. His joy causes her sadness, his sleep brings her insomnia, and she becomes convinced he is sneaking into her room, even eating her socks. As she tries to impose orders and regulations on her opaque visitor, the woman's fantasies of power and control grow ever wilder.
Sly, wilful and full of slanted humour, Overstaying is a profound and uncanny exploration of hospitality, integration and the stranger within all of us.</p>
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Swiss writer Koch's bewitching debut, a woman's isolated existence is upended by the arrival of a strange being. The unnamed narrator lives alone in the small mountain village where she grew up. One fateful day, she locks eyes with "the visitor" on a train platform. The newcomer is only glancingly described: he has claws, wears a poncho, and his hair juts out "in hedgehog fashion." She invites him home, and for a while, the two fall into a comfortable domestic rhythm despite not speaking the same language ("One thing I liked about the visitor was that I never knew if he could actually understand me"). Eventually, however, the narrator wonders whether the visitor will ever leave, and questions whether she truly accepts his presence. Told in swirling, disorienting fragments, the narration is sometimes funny ("I've never said I'm proud of how wicked I am. And yet I must admit I've come to terms with it relatively quickly"), sometimes lightly ominous ("During the night, once the visitor falls into his nightmarish sleep, I will measure the width of his bite"), and consistently sharp. Fans of dreamy and mysterious fiction like Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond will devour this.
